Summer on the Peninsula. The heat’s ramping up, the usual holiday madness is building. Detective Inspector Hal Challis is already recycling his shower water and starting to dread Christmas. But this year there’s something more. Women abducted and murdered on the Old Highway. A pall of fear over the scorched paddocks. The media are demanding answers—and Challis’s sleepy beat is set to explode.

An unidentified man is fished out of the sea with an anchor strapped to his waist. And for Detective Inspector Hal Challis, this sparks the beginning of a chilling series of shotgun killings. As Challis and his partner, Detective Sergeant Ellen Destry, investigate, a farmer on the Peninsula erupts into violence and becomes the target of a massive manhunt. Then Challis finds some aerial photographs in the possession of his friend Kitty linking her to the murders…

The coastal community of Waterloo seems an improbable setting for sex parties, blackmail and murder, but then D. I. Hal Challis and D. S. Ellen Destry are called to investigate the brutal slaying of Janine McQuarrie—shot in a deserted country lane while her seven-year-old daughter looked on. It doesn’t help that Janine’s father-in-law is Challis and Destry’s superior and that the progress of the police is hampered by lies and secrets on all sides. Everybody has something to hide this winter. And someone in Waterloo looks determined to kill again.

Ten-year-old Katie Blasko is missing. Detective Sergeant Ellen Destry, alert to rumours of a paedophile ring operating on the Peninsula, is thinking abduction. Her colleagues are thinking bad family, truancy. Her boss is thinking about the media. And everyone, including Ellen, is wondering whether she’s good enough to handle this without Detective Inspector Challis. But Hal Challis is a thousand kilometres away, with his dying father. Ellen Destry’s leading the team on her own. And if she’s right, Katie Blasko is running out of time.

When hordes of eighteen-year-old schoolies descend on the Mornington Peninsula, the overstretched police of Waterloo expect reports of party drugs and underage drinkers. What they don’t count on is a brutal bashing that attracts political attention. Newly embarked on a relationship with his sergeant, Ellen Destry, Detective Inspector Challis doesn’t really need the brass looking over his shoulder. Then a bludgeoned corpse is found, and it becomes clear something much darker than adolescent mischief has befallen the idyllic coastal town.

Hal Challis is in trouble: he’s been carpeted by the boss for speaking out about police budget cuts and is desperately missing his lover, Ellen Destry, who is overseas on a study tour. But there’s plenty to keep his mind off his problems. A rapist in police uniform is stalking Challis’s Peninsula beat and a serial armed robber is headed in his direction. Not to mention a very clever, very mysterious female cat burglar who may or may not be planning something on Challis’s patch.

A small bushfire, but nasty enough for ice cooks to abandon their lab—fatal, too. But when the bodies in the burnt-out Mercedes prove to be a pair of Sydney hitmen, Detective Inspector Hal Challis’s inquiries into a local ice epidemic take a darker turn. Meanwhile, Ellen Destry, head of the new sex crimes unit, finds herself not only juggling the personalities of her team but hunting a serial rapist who leaves no evidence behind.